HOPE EMERGES FROM THE headquarters and steps into chaos. Several platoons of President Vasquez’s Brown Shirts have plowed their way to the top of the mountain and are battling it out with Chancellor Maddox’s soldiers. It’s Brown Shirt against Brown Shirt—inverted triangles versus no triangles. The rattle of bullets fills the night.
Hope bends at the waist, putting her hands on her knees. The pain from her thigh shoots down her leg, numbing her foot and her toes. Blood pools in her shoe. She looks around and catches a glimpse of Chancellor Maddox’s ankle-length coat, trailing her as she races away.
Hope pushes herself to a standing position and gives chase, knowing exactly where Maddox is headed: the elevator.
Soldiers from both sides close in, and Hope has to take a sweeping arc to avoid their gunfire. Her lower pant leg is soaked in blood, and at one point she stops and uses her belt to tie a tourniquet around her upper thigh.
By the time she reaches the elevator, it doesn’t work. Hope can press the button all night long, but it’s not lighting up. Maddox has somehow disabled the thing—it’s stuck at the very bottom. Hope has no choice but to take the stairs, all seven hundred of them. At least this time she’s going down.
She limps and shuffles down the metal steps, feet clanging, the sound echoing off the cement walls. The loss of blood and all the switchbacking back and forth makes her dizzy. Her face goes clammy. She hugs the railing, wondering how far ahead the chancellor’s going to be.
By the time she reaches the bottom of the stairwell, her head swims. She opens the door and steps into the blackened tunnel, stumbling the length of the passageway. Only when she emerges from the tunnel and sees the stars does she regain her balance. The fresh air is a welcome slap to the face.
She hurries to the tram stop, but when she reaches it, her heart sinks. The tram is halfway down the mountain, and in the distant window, growing ever smaller, is the silhouette of Chancellor Maddox.
“Damn it!” Hope curses.
She’ll have to wait for it to reach the bottom and the other tram to reach the top. Then again, something tells her that Maddox might very well disable the tram, just as she disabled the elevator. So how will I get down the mountain? she wonders.
That’s when the possibility occurs to her. It’s dangerous, it’s foolhardy, it’s downright stupid. But it’s the only solution she can think of.
There’s a small wooden hut by the tram stop, and she makes a beeline for it. It’s locked, of course, but nothing she can’t open after a couple of well-placed kicks, even with only one good leg. It’s a storage shed, filled floor to ceiling with tools, cleaning supplies . . . and ski equipment.
She finds a pair of skis that seem long enough, grabs some gloves and goggles, and lugs them to the tram stop. As she slips on the equipment, her eyes take in the steep mountainside below. It slopes downward in a hurry, and she can only guess the angle. Forty-five degrees. Maybe fifty. Maybe more.
When her father taught her how to ski, he explained how in pre-Omega days, ski runs were categorized. Green Circle for easiest, Blue Square for intermediate, Black Diamond for advanced, and Double Black Diamond for expert only. She would rank this slope as Double Double Black Diamond—Trapezoid of Death.
She has strapped on the skis and slipped the goggles over her eyes. She grimaces as she stands, puts weight on her leg . . . and pushes off.
She falls almost immediately. Even when she gets up, it takes her a long moment to get used to the skis, to find her balance, to adjust to the fresh powder. The angle is steep—steeper even than she guessed—and she falls twice more in quick succession, stopping only when she rolls into a tree. Her right leg can barely support her weight. She tries again, slowly finding her rhythm. The skis’ edges bite into the snow, sending a wave of powder into the air. A trail of blood follows her down the mountain like fairy-tale bread crumbs.
Her only illumination is the moon, casting a pale-blue light on the gleaming white of the snow. The snow-shrouded pines and firs are mere shadows—absences of light in a dark night. Things to avoid.
She finds herself in a clearing where she can see all the way to the bottom of the hill. The tram is coming to a stop, and a yellow rectangle of light falls on the snow as the door opens and a figure emerges. Chancellor Maddox has reached the town; Hope is still halfway up the mountain.
She has no choice but to ski faster.
She straightens out her path, doesn’t zigzag quite so far to either side. Her speed increases, and the icy wind numbs her cheeks, her nose, her lips. She hurtles down the mountainside, clipping branches, scraping rocks. On more than one occasion she face-plants into the snow, then hurries to extract herself. Her right leg burns with pain.
Still, it all comes down to this: she can’t let Maddox get away. Live today, tears tomorrow.